HP Innovation Journal Issue 12: Summer 2019 | Page 65

DATA, DATA
EVERYWHERE
At the Edge of Computing/Energy Efficiency
CHANDRAKANT D. PATEL
Chief Engineer & Senior Fellow, HP
MADHU ATHREYA
Distinguished Technologist, HP
JON BREWSTER
Fellow, VP & Chief Technologist for Software (SW), HP
Every day, technology headlines describe the “data explo-
sion” generated by an exponentially increasing number of
devices, monitors, and sensors in the Internet of Things
(IoT) landscape worldwide. As it relates to energy demand
and consumption, this expanding volume of data has an
upside and a downside. The upside: IoT data allows us to use
energy more efficiently, as in automating heating, cooling,
and lights in city buildings, for example. The downside: this
data needs to be turned into actionable information and sent
on round trips to the cloud, which is becoming a less and less
viable proposition. The time and expense involved in moving
terabytes and exabytes of data is prohibitive.
As Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy notes,
“Moving an exabyte of data would take 26 years with 
a 10-Gb-per-second connection.” 
Rather than processing data in the
cloud, new approaches to compute
architecture are bringing process-
ing power closer to where the data
lives—at the edge.
The “edge” is generally defined either as an endpoint
device that generates data or a compute resource no more
than one network hop from that device. Edge data must
be analyzed to be useful in driving improvements in how
the devices operate and deliver value to users. 1
In this article, we’ll explore three areas in which HP’s
innovation is focused on driving compute efficiency at the
edge: ultra-efficient processors, software 2.0, and virtual
machines/virtual factories.
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